Using Advanced Router Features to Secure Your Wifi Network

Many people don’t consider their home wifi network to be a source of concern when it comes to protecting their data. They worry about their phone or computer being hacked while connecting to the internet, or about someone doing an RFID scan of their wallet on the subway, but they don’t put a lot of thought into their personal wireless network. The truth is that an attacker can gain easy access to sensitive files by simply being in range of your wifi and launching an attack against the network. This post will discuss three ways to keep hackers from connecting to your wifi and stealing your data.

Signal Direction

The vast majority of home wireless routers are omnidirectional, meaning they broadcast the wifi signal in all directions. This makes sense for most users because you want to have the same signal quality regardless of where you are in relation to the router. However, this is a two-edged sword because an omnidirectional router can broadcast wifi outside your home and allow an attacker to get a signal by sitting in a car near your house, for example. To combat this, some manufacturers provide antennas that can be attached to the router and only broadcast the signal in a specific direction. If your router is located near an exterior wall, you can have the signal pointed towards the rest of the house and away from the outside, greatly reducing the range where the wifi can be picked up outside. If these antennas aren’t available for your router, a crude (but still effective) solution is to put a tinfoil “shield” next to the router in the direction you don’t want the signal to go.

Channel Selection

If you live in a crowded wireless environment like a college dorm or apartment complex with lots of wifi networks, wireless channel selection can be an additional control to keep your wifi protected. There are a total of 16 wireless channels that a router can broadcast on, and most routers will come with the “Auto” selection chosen, which means it will broadcast on the least-crowded channel available. While this is preferable for signal quality, you can deliberately set your router to a crowded channel so that an attacker may not be able to reliably connect to it from outside your house. Of course, this will degrade the signal quality for your devices, so you would need to ensure that your devices are either physically close to the router, or hardwired in.

MAC Address Whitelisting

A highly effective method to protect your wifi network is to use MAC address whitelisting. Each wireless device has its own unique MAC address, which is like a serial number that identifies it to the router. The simple solution here is to only allow MAC addresses from devices you own to connect to the router, which can be done through an advanced administrative setting in the router config. Connect all your devices to the wifi, find out what their MACs are through the router control panel (it will tell you under a setting like “Active Connections”), then set the router to block everything except those addresses. The drawback here is that you’ll need to add the MAC address for each new device manually before it can connect, and your friends might get upset when they come over and can’t use your wifi!

Protecting your home wireless network is an important step to safeguarding your data and important files. Follow the tips in this post to keep attackers from getting a foothold in your network.